After the Hamburg Colonial Institute was founded in 1908, the Africanist CARL MEINHOF demanded a phonetics laboratory, which was installed in 1910 and directed by GIULIO PANCONCELLI-CALZIA, who developed this laboratory into an excellent place for research and teaching in experimental phonetics, applying the most advanced methods available, among them photography and cinematography. It was renamed Institute of Phonetics in 1962. When it was closed down in 2006/07, its display collection and other historic material were transferred to the historic acoustic-phonetic collection (HAPS) of the TU Dresden. A description of the material objects has in the meantime been published in a printed catalogue ([25], [27]). What is not widely known, however, is that the collection also includes numerous archival materials, among them many photographic documents. It is the aim of this paper to give an overview of these stocks and their genesis, starting with the history of vocal cord imagery.